Transforming the Business: How Land & Sea Dept. Succeeds with Tripleseat and TripleseatDirect
Land & Sea Dept. uses Tripleseat’s robust suite of features to continuously grow amazing, one-of-a-kind, guest-centered group, and event experiences. Land & Sea Dept. manages an average of 75 social and corporate gatherings each month across 7 Midwest neighborhood fast-casual restaurants, and 3 Midwest and South Central hotel restaurants. They attribute much of their ability to execute this success and plan for more events and catering growth using Tripleseat and TripleseatDirect.
About Land & Sea Dept.
Land & Sea Dept. is a concept and project development studio cohesively and creatively working across disciplines. They have a passion for restaurants and specialize in managing a variety of concepts that hold in-house private events and off-site catering for a broad range of event types. Land & Sea Dept. venues can host anything from small gatherings and group dinners to large corporate events and weddings. Events at Land & Sea Dept. venues tend to host anywhere from 10-500 guests, with common order sizes ranging from a few hundred dollars to $20k.
Currently, Land & Sea Dept. offers a range of semi-private and dedicated event spaces for their restaurant brands, including Parson’s Chicken & Fish, Lonesome Rose, Longman and Eagle, Land & Sea Dept at Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, Dicey’s Pizza & Tavern, and Wax Myrtle.
We spoke with Ginny Cook, Director of Events, Programming, and Partnerships at Land & Sea Dept., who candidly shared her experience using Tripleseat and TripleseatDirect. With extensive experience in event management, Cook is experienced with event execution and using hospitality software. Dissatisfied with various technologies she’s used in the past for performance issues and lack of features, she shared with us her hesitation when she initially moved over from legacy software to Tripleseat. But coming out of the pandemic and in anticipation of a surge in events, she decided to lean into technology.
How Tripleseat helps
By using Tripleseat, Land & Sea Dept. is able to:
- Centralize private dining, events, and catering details in one reliable platform.
- Access crucial features in real-time to meet the operational needs of the entire team across a variety of markets, store types, and event offerings.
- Automate communication and share accurate documentation, providing both excellent team collaboration and a stellar guest experience.
- Empower customers with self-booking through TripleseatDirect.
- Leverage data and reporting to capture and grow event revenue and success.
Prior Challenges
Past technology was unreliable and inefficient
Prior to using Tripleseat beginning in 2020, Land & Sea Dept. had attempted to use Google Drive to manage event and catering information. But these sheets of data became cumbersome, posed a risk with customer data, and were extremely inefficient. In the past, Land & Sea Dept. also attempted to adopt a legacy software system but quickly found it to be extremely buggy and difficult to use. Cook recalled the frustration and time-intensive work of having to hand-build individual BEOs in an overall unhelpful system.
Event operations needed team alignment
Because Land & Sea Dept. has a unique and diverse suite of restaurants, they were challenged in meeting operational efficiencies amongst all their distinct restaurants that offered multiple menus, spaces, and event services. With such a broad and growing team to support their various restaurants and the expanding demand for parties and events after the pandemic, Cook explained that their event managers and entire operations had to move fast! In order to succeed, all team members needed to be organized and in the know of all things related to event operations.
Guest experience for high-demand restaurant events and catering
There’s been no slowing down in customer demand for Land & Sea Dept. post-pandemic. They have been asked to accommodate all sorts of scenarios for their guests in their various locations – anything from busy families with kids who need their table and food quickly, to a small group gathering for a special occasion, all the way to a large corporate or social party. Land & Sea Dept. knew they needed to lighten the load, that customers were ready to be empowered more with intuitive technology, and that guest experience would need to be excellent in order to succeed.
Results Using Tripleseat
Tripleseat made events efficient
From the extensive and dependable features of Tripleseat, Cook has happily relied on Tripleseat to help manage Land & Sea Dept.’s growing event operations. Because Tripleseat has all the features within one accessible and intuitive platform, Cook explains they have an efficient experience for both their team and the customers alike. “Tripleseat is the first technology that I’ve interacted with that is very good on the client side and the back-end event manager side,” says Cook. She further explains that using Tripleseat’s lead forms has simplified the event inquiry process immensely.
Tripleseat aligned the entire Land & Sea Dept. team
Tripleseat is versatile and feature-rich to make it easy to get entire teams aligned for all types of hospitality and event tasks. About 30 total team members of Land & Sea Dept., including general managers, floor managers, and event managers, use the cloud-based platform to stay nimble and succeed operationally. Tripleseat’s communication features and content templates are crucial and enormously time-saving for what Cook says are “endless scenarios across all restaurants.” Land & Sea Dept. keeps all their documentation in Tripleseat so that everyone can find what they need. Accessible on the go, she says, “Tripleseat has been really transformative for everyone working these events and provides sanity and quality of life.”
TripleseatDirect provides an awesome guest experience
Land & Sea Dept. adopted the TripleseatDirect feature in several of their restaurants to empower their guests to make group reservations on-premise, directly order catering, or book an in-house private event. TripleseatDirect allows guests to “choose their own adventure and one-click book” the date, time, and menus for smaller groups, allowing the events team to spend more time focusing on larger events that require more attention. The experience for customers is both clear and seamless.
“TripleseatDirect has been super turnkey for us because we have a really lean team to manage a huge amount of events across a lot of different stores. To have those smaller parties just be able to totally choose their own adventure and one-click-book has saved our event managers a huge amount of time. We’re really enthusiastic about that feature because anybody that has worked in events knows that you can spend the same amount of time planning for a one thousand dollar party as you can for a thirty thousand dollar party, So TripleseatDirect is very good. We love it!”
Ginny Cook – Director of Events, Programming and Partnerships
More events = more revenue
By choosing to use Tripleseat, Cook can focus on driving value to her customers and growing the Land & Sea Dept. event and catering revenue. She shares that Tripleseat’s reporting helps her meet responsibilities to track sales and set strategies across the 10 stores she manages. “It all populates really beautifully and very easily. The data is palatable to our investors and our owners, and easy for me to access,” she says.
Since partnering with Tripleseat, Land & Sea Dept. has handled its growth and expansion smoothly. They started as a small independent restaurant group and have evolved to having 10 restaurant locations, hosting on average 75 events each month. Their private dining, events, and catering revenue has grown 400% across all of their stores. Cook says, “To have a platform that is so easy to use, organizes us so efficiently, I think that it has helped us make more money.”
What’s next for Land & Sea Dept.?
As the demand for events and gatherings has boomed, Tripleseat is a key component in managing this high volume of business. Cook says, “Land & Sea is projecting our biggest events year ever. Not only because we opened 3 new restaurants last year, but also because there’s a serious need for party spaces, wedding spaces, and gathering spaces. Keeping up is the challenge, and we couldn’t do that without Tripleseat!”
Cook further explains that because the TripleseatDirect feature has worked so well in many of their restaurants, she would like to add this direct booking feature for all their stores. Additionally, she’d like to explore Tripleseat Hotels to help better manage multi-day conference services, multiple meal periods, and blanket contract type of bookings at their Wax Myrtles property at the Thompson Austin hotel. She says, “It’s wonderful to have all these features in one platform.”
Ready to transform your business?
Are you ready to transform your business for huge success with a turnkey solution? Use the best tool that proves itself over and over to manage your group reservations and events. Schedule a Tripleseat demo to take a closer look at our event management features.
